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’

I hadn’t consciously reached that conclusion until he said it, but every word was like a reel clanking to a halt on an enormous slot machine: chunk chunk chunk chunk, followed by the tinny jingling of the jackpot.

‘Why would he do it, though?’ I demanded. ‘If he – they – had already taken John over, then they didn’t have to worry about the investigation any more. If they did it to silence him, then the job was done. Why did they need to kill him?’

‘You tell me,’ Covington suggested, still staring down at me.

‘Because they don’t go for broken-down old men,’ I muttered.

Chunk chunk chunk. ‘Because whoever got that gig – whoever possessed John – was just doing what had to be done to shut him up. Guided suicide. There was no need to stick around for the long-term.’

Covington nodded. ‘That’s the way I read it,’ he said. ‘I’m sure when they’re choosing their new wardrobe they go for the young and healthy. John struck me as anything but.’

Some of the reels were still spinning, still dropping into their final positions: a bell here, a lemon there.

John’s fragmented notes and the crazy paranoid dance he’d led me proved that Carla had been right about him: his mind was starting to collapse in on itself. But some of the things she’d seen and described to me she hadn’t understood at all. How could she? When J»uld/i>ohn went around the house writing messages to himself and hiding them, then went around again and burned them or ripped them up, that had looked like the purest insanity. But not if it was a game for two players: not if John was fighting back against the passenger riding inside his mind and soul, and almost winning. But it wasn’t a fair fight, of course: at least, not after the other guy got the drop on him with a fucking shotgun.

I lurched to my feet: I just couldn’t keep sitting there any more as my mind stripped its gears trying to accommodate these new facts.

‘How do you know about all this?’ I demanded, involuntarily shifting my weight and finding a good brace point, as though even now I was afraid that Covington might lean in and throw a punch at me.

‘Until recently,’ Covington admitted, his expression turning a little grim now, ‘I knew almost nothing. At least – I suspected that Mount Grace was a front for some kind of illegal activity. There were too many things that didn’t add up. It was odd that the trust had kept an interest in Mount Grace at all, in a portfolio that was dominated by Pacific Rim venture stocks and West African gold.